Collaborative Research: Lifting the Barriers: Understanding and Enhancing Approaches to Teaching Communication and Teamwork Among Engineering Faculty

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This engineering education research project investigates faculty beliefs about communication and teamwork, and compares these beliefs to students' beliefs. The research focuses on first elucidating what faculty and students believe about communication and teamwork, then investigating the alignment of faculty and students beliefs, and finally studying interventions that transform faculty beliefs. The study will look at these beliefs in three engineering fields--civil, mechanical, and industrial--in order to maximize the impact on student learning. The research will occur at five partner schools, making research results more transferable. The project can have broad impact on how teamwork and communication are taught since it bridges research on epistemology (the theory of what is knowledge and knowing) to practice. A very important outcome of this project, if successful, is changing how faculty teach and students learn the key professional skills of teamwork and communication. The project has targeted research sites to represent diverse populations of students to help ensure that the results can be used across a broad spectrum of universities.